When eBay makes changes big or small, a very vocal group of buyers and sellers react. Now, eBay is trying to involve its users earlier in the process by getting their input before new features are introduced.
The first change to be crowd sourced this way is a set of new tools to search eBay’s Web site. EBay has about 200 million items for sale at any given time, and sifting through that list can be burdensome.
Instead of rolling out the search features to all users, eBay will put them in a new place on the site Garden by eBay [sounds like a hotel site, not a "labs" area (-:]. People can choose to use the new tools, rate them and send critiques to the product team, which will continually tweak them. Some will fail and others will be incorporated into the main site.
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For example, categories to narrow a search — such as choosing a style, color or brand of a handbag — used to be buried, but will now show up higher on the page. Right now, to narrow a search to, say, a never-opened Nikon point-and-shoot 10-megapixel digital camera, a shopper has to click on five separate pages. The new tools will let people hover over the categories, narrowing the search with a single click.
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